A Manifesto for Neuromarketing, 2008

7/23/2019 A Manifesto for Neuromarketing, 2008

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Journal of Consumer Behaviour

/ .

Consumer Behav.

7: 263-271 2008)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.250

Editorial

m anifes to for neu rom arket ing

sc i ence

In recent years, the rise of the application of neuroscientific

research m ethods to market research has resulted in some strident

criticisms and rather apocalyptic predictions in the popular press

e.g., Burne,

2003;

Thompson,

2003;

Blakeslee, 2004; Tierney,

2004; Withchalls, 2004; Lee Hotz, 2005; McConnon, 2007; Carr,

2008). Certainly, it is worth being concerned about the unscrupu-

lous use of neuroscientific research for commercial gain for many

reasons; not least of which is the use of technology and expertise

^vhich could be m ore fruitfully employed in a socially beneficial

mann er, rather than to sell more widge ts.

As

well

as

this, it

is

not out

of the question that m arketing executives may find the com pelling

images and convoluted language employed in commercial neuro-

marketing studies to be rather seductive, while in reality they have

been told little which was not already to be expected, or could be

discovered using simpler methods. Yet in anothe r sense those early

soothsayers of doom

w ere w rong

about the impact of neuromarket-

ing. Neuromarketing is here and, instead of creating legions of

consum er zombies controlled by om nipotent co rporations wh o use

neuroimaging to create hypereffective advertising campaigns, ^ve

have seen the beginnings of

a

more rigorous, and altogether more

relevant, scientific appro ach to the study of marketing

questions.

In

fact, the mistake made by so many early commentators on the

dangers of neuromarketing was to ignore the large quantities of

scholarly marketing research appearing which employed neuros-

cientific m ethods to gain greater insight into questions which have

long exercised the greatest minds in marketing science. The

marriage of cognitive neuroscience and marketing research has

indeed seen the produc tion of many scientific endeavors exam ining

a wide variety of different social phenomena associated around

market exchanges. Rather than commercial applications, more

balanced recent discussions define neuromarketing as

...the

application of neuroscientific methods to analyze and under-

stand human behavior in relation to markets and marketing

exchanges Lee etal.. 2007), While this is a stalwart definition we

are

now^ in

a

position

to

elaborate it further and provide

a

framew^ork

for the continued evolution of

this

form of organizational cognitive


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264 Editorial

neuroscience (OCN; B utler and Senior, 2007). The journal you now

hold in your handsisthe product of this evolution andasnapshotof

where scholarly neuromarketing research currently stands.

The enthusiastic debate in the popular press which surrounded

the em ergence of neuromarketingwasprobably inspiredbythe oft-

cited but discredited notion of a buy button in the brain. This

phrase describes the attempts to locate a mythical region of the

human brain that w hen activated would

drive

subsequent consumer

behavior, perhaps without consumers being consciously aware of

this.

Of course, those with long mem ories or an interest in the area

will recall similar criticisms of another now-discredited concept;

subliminal advertising. Nevertheless, the very fact that purchase

behavior is not a simple binary social response - thatis,you see an

advertisement and then buy the product - renders attempts to

identifyits singlelocation m ooticfLeeand Kacen,2008).However,

there is methodto thisapparen t madness because, quite conversely,

the pursuit of the buy button in the brain also offers us the

chance to engage in a Faustian pact of sorts. More specifically, by

identifying the cortical subs trate /s tha t are engaged in compu lsive

consumer behavior we have

a

means by which to focus therapeutic

regimes that can target consumption/marketing disorders such as

pathological spending/gam bling. Nevertheless, contem porary neu-

romarketing can offer us much more than this, such as an insight

into the various processes that are evident within market

exchan ges. Processes such as distribution channels, pricing policy,

ethical branding, etc., are all considered within a market exchang e

but until now have been the domain of marketing research based

around social psychology, econom etrics, and other social sciences.

Indeed, during the early evolution of neuromarketing it could

conceivably have been considered a form of applied social

psychology. But due to the fact that neuromarketing is essentially

the study of the cortical substrates of social influence in an applied

setting it must now be considered a scientific subdiscipline in its

own right. The applied nature of neuromarketing is also the

hallmark of its larger cousin, OCN (Butler and Senior, 2007). It is of

course possible for social psychologists to study social influence,

but it is the fact that neuromarketers study its neural signature

within its natural ecology that makes the approach un ique.

The field has evolved considerably and, due to the nature of

neuromarketing research, it is important that several pointers are

followed to ensure that research is carried out in a successful

fashion. Some of these pointers m ay seem like common sense and

indeed they may

be,

bu t we have provided specific rationale for their

inclusion here.

All neuromarketing research needs to have a strong theoretical

background with a clear experimental hypothesis. At first pass this

may seem like comm on sense however on closer inspectionthingsdo

start to get a bit complicated. At its core is the fact that cognitive

neuroscience is involved in measuring the relationship betw een the


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Editorial

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brain and mind. Within this relationship we have a paradox, it is

conceivable that the cognitive neuroscientist can measure some

intangible aspects of the mind-brain relationship and thus free

themselves from the Popperian constraints of falsifiability (Senior

and Rippon, 2007). As the neuromarketing scientist is building on

the established effects that the cognitive neuroscientist has already

discovered,inalmostallcases neuromarketing experiments can and

should be defined with distincta priori and falsifiable hypothesis.

Such an approach would not only allow the neuromarketing

scientist to make larger advances in the understanding of the topic

area but should also allay any undue criticism of the experimental

procedures.

Developing on from this point is a need for neuromarketing

scientists to pay special attention to subject recruitment and

inclusion. Given that neuromarketing is the applied study of social

influence it makes sense that the participants who are studied fit as

tightly as possible into that applied niche. For example, there is no

point in studying female participants if the variable of interest

concerns male consumers. This may seem like a fairly straightfor-

ward assumption but given that the element of influence that we the

neuromarketers are interested in studying is often specific there is

often little point in studying heterogenous populations. This is a

rather different philosophy to many methods currently pre-existing

in marketing research, and further exemplifies the need for

marketing researchers who are interested in conducting neuromar-

keting studies to spend considerable time in designing appropriate

studies. Otherwise results

will

ultimately be meaningless, despite the

attractive brain images which may be produced. Furthermore, a

special caveat must be made regarding the study of children and

other vulnerable populations. Serious ethical consideration must be

given to the appropriateness of studying paediatric or other relevant

populations where there appears no benefit to the subject asthere is

in e.g., medical research). This issue is covered in more depth by

Murphy

et

a l.in this very issue.

Given the range ofthe questions that could be addressed within a

neuromarketing paradigm, such projects should be reviewed by

local Institutional Review Boards GRBs) with special consideration.

For example, the presentation of pictures of emotional faces to

subjects while they undergo a brain imaging procedure may be a

fairly ubiquitous procedure within mainstream cognitive neu-

roscience. However, the presentation of sexually explicit imagery

in

a

series of advertisements and the correlation of engendered brain

activity

vk ith

motivational behavior raises several unique questions.

Such questions mayfaUoutside the current remit of most

IRBs

who

may be used to more standard empirical approaches. Accordingly, it

is important that a neuroethical framework be adopted when

considering neuromarking

studies.

Neuroethics

is

a subdiscipline of

bioethics and can best be described with the bipartite model

of Roskies (2002). Here, neuroethics is divided into the ethics of


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practice; that is, what are the implications for consent (and similar

issues) when presenting participants with various stimuli (see e.g.,

Shaw

etal

2008 ) and the ethics of poten tial discovery; thatis,w h a t

are the implications for understanding the cortical mechanisms for

moral and ethical cognitions an d the like. On e quickly realizes that,

given the type of research tha t is possible he re,

a

ill appraisal ofth e

potential r isks is very much need ed.

The studies which have been collected together under the banner

of this special issue of the Journal of Consum er Behavior span an

extremely w ide range of issues related to the abo ve discussion. We

were delighted witli the variety and quality of submissions in

response to our call for papers, and the papers in this special issue

together provide a unique picture of the state-of-the-art of neuro-

marketing science b oth in theoretical and empirical terms. We begin

the special issue proper with a group of three papers which are

primarily overviews of various aspects of the field. In A Current

Overview of Consum er Neurosden ce Mirja Hubert and Peter

Kenning ex pan d som ewh at on earlier definitions of neurom arketing

by differentiating between consumer neuroscience as the scientific

discipline and neuromarketing as the managerial application of the

findings from this discipline. This is an interesting distinction,

al though not one w hich w e would necessarily concur with - most

basically since marketing as a discipline is about considerably more

than consumer issues, as Lee et al. (2007) pointed out. Hubert and

Kenning provid e an excellent introduc tion to prior work in the field,

as well as an approachable overview of the various key brain

structures most likely to be relevant to consumer neuroscience. As

svich this is a m ost ex cellen t plac e to start for the uninitiated.

Our second paper is focused on an absolutely vital area for

considerat ion by any researcher ^vho m sh es to con duct research in

the neurom arketing area - namely neu roethics . InThe Neuroethics of

Neuromarketing Emily Mu rphy, Jud y Ules, and Pete r Reiner, thre e

world leaders in the area of neuroethics, present a strongly argued

case for the prima cy of ethical considerations in the con duc t of both

academic and commercial neuromarketing research. Beginning

w^ith an interesting and illuminating parallel with the idea of

subliminal advertising, Muiphy et al. focus on the idea of obtaining

information from, or manipulating the behavior of, consumers

without their knowledge, which has clear ethical implications.

Following this, they deal with the critical issue of subject

vulnerability, which has implications for those involved in commer-

cial and acad emic research . Perhaps m ost interesting for many w illbe

the discussion ofth e sedu ctiven ess of neuroscientific findings, and

the tem ptat ion which many researchers have to provide very simple

answ ers to ^vhat are com plex q uestions. Murphy

etal.

co nclude with

an early version of a code of ethics for what they term the

neuromarketing industry, al though w e would argue that such a

code is also likely to be of considerable use to scholarly research as

w^ell.


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Follow ing from this is Tyler Perrach ione and John Perrachione s

Brains an d Bran ds: Developing Mutually Informa tiveResearchin

Neurosdence andMarketing

This particular paper - as w^ell as

being very informative in

its

own right -

is

an excellent example ofa

cross-disciplinary collaboration between a neuroscientist and a

marketing researcher. Given our own previous work (e.g., Butler

and Senior, 2007; Lee

et al.

2007; Lee and Chamberlain, 2008) it

should be no surprise that we consider such collaborations to be

vital to the continuing

flourishing

of neurom arketing, and OCN as

a

whole. Perrachione and Perrachione first provide an illuminating

introduction to thekeyfeatures of neuroscientific research Nvhich is

likely to be of significant benefit to the developm ent of future high-

quality neuromarketing research. Following this, Perrachione and

Perrachione show ho w marketing researchers can understand key

marketing questions from the perspective of the neuroscientist -

that is, in terms of questions of brain s tructure and function. Such

framing endeavors are likely to significantly increase the chances of

fruitftil cross-disciplinary collaboration. The pap er introduces som e

fascinating contemporary issues in neuroscience, and shows how

they may impact on our understanding of consumer behavior.

Finally, Perrachione and Pe rrachione provide an important critical

discussion of commercial marketing applications of neuroscientific

methodologies.

Our second g roup of pape rs consists of empirical neurom arketing

research, and as such each provides some absorbing insights into

both their topics of interest, as well as the mutually inform-

ative nature of neuromarketing research itself Beginning with

The Proactive

Brain:

Using LittleInformation toMakePredictive

Judgements,Moshe

Bar and

Maital

Neta synthesize

a

set of empirical

studies to show how the brain continuously generates predictions

of the ftiture, based on very little information. Ultimately, much

discussion cen ters on w^hat appears to be a hum an p reference for

curves rather than sharp edges, linking back to the idea that sharp

edges

may be

an implicit

signal

of danger at

first

perception.

This

has

important implications within a marketing context, w^hich are

sho^vn in the con text of produc t design and advertising. This pape r

is an exam ple of how very basic neuroscientific findings can have

substantive implications for marketing issues and questions, and all

that is needed in such cases is an informed interpretation of such

findings.

Following this is Baldeesh Gakhal and Carl Senior s

Examining

the Influence ofFame in thePresenceofBeauty: An Electrodermal

Neuromarketing Study.This study provides an excellent exam ple

of

how^

neuromarketing (and indeed, neuroscientific) research does

not

have

to consist only of studies involving the

use

of direc t cortical

measuring devices such as fMRI and MEG scanners. Gakhal and

Senior use the well-accepted method of measuring the electro-

dermal activity (EDA, w^hich has also been called galvanic skin

response/GSR, or skin conductance response/SCR) of subjects in


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ord er to exp lore differences b etw ee n th e efficacy of eithe r celebrity

or beauty in driving consumer behavior and intentions. Such an

approach is illuminating for various reasons, particularly since -

given that celebri ties tend to be considered m ore at t ractive p e r ie -

any such differences may be hard to detect using traditional

marketing research methodologies. The key contribution of this

paper is to begin to unpack what may have been something of a

confound in our previous understanding of how celebri ty real ly

influences consumer intentions via advertising.

Next, Marco Stoll, Sebastian Baecke, and Peter Kenning present

Wha t Th ey See is Wha t they Get? An M RI Study on Neural Correlates

of Attractive Packages. This study is an illustrative exam ple of w ha t

has beco me in recent times the classic neurom arketing study, in

that it takes a basic neuroscientific finding an d atte m pts to transfer it

to a marketing-relevant con tex t. In the pr ese nt case, the basic finding

is

that the brain app ears to pro ces s negative and positive visual stimuli

in different manners. Stoll et al. apply this idea to the packaging of

products, showing that indeed attractive and unattractive packages

appear to process differently, with attractive packages showing

significantly more activity in reward and attention-relevant areas of

the brain than unattractive packages, which conversely showed

increased activity in areas associated with aversion. This is an

interesting finding, given that it used as stimuli actual packa ges rathe r

than ones expressly designed to be attractive and vmattractive. That

subjects still exhibited such differences in activity as are found in basic

neuroscientific research (wh ere m uch g reater contrasts in stimuli are

generally used) has important implications for researchers and

practitioners. It may be interesting to speculate what the bases of

' 'attractiveness we re here, and perha ps this can be partly linked back

to Bar and Neta's earlier paper.

The fourth of our empirically based papers is How Choice

Ambiguity Mod ulates Activity in Brain Areas Representing Brand

Preference: Evidence Erom Consumer Neurosdence

by Hilke

Plassmann and Peter Kenning. This paper builds on one of the few

areas of neu rom arke ting rese arch w^hich has received cons iderable

attentio n ov er a perio d of years, namely that of bran d prefer enc e. As

Plassmann and Kenning show, prior wo rk has explored h ow brands

w^ork to influence consumer preferences for similar products, as

well as influencing the actual consu mp tion e xpe rience for brande d

products. Plassmann and Kenning extend this work to include a

consideration of choice ambiguity. Using an fMRI study, they find

that increased activity in areas relevant to brand preference is

tr iggered by the interact ion between brand information and

ambiguity. This finding is important as it supports a signaling

theory of the brand rather than a cognitive psychological

theory, which would instead imply that brand information

reduces ambiguity, thus triggering preference. As such, Plassmann

and Kenning's work here is a good example of a theoret ical ly


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269

driven neuromarketing study, and it shows how the incorporation

of neuroscientific paradigms can help further unravel the complex

nature of marketing phenomena, and advance our understanding

considerably.

Our final group of papers reprises the first section, in that it

contains a set of theoretical papers that speculate on the underlying

philosophical frameworks which may be relevant for neuromarket-

ing. Firstly, Gordon Foxall's Reward Emotion and Consumer

Choice: Erom Neuroeconomics to Neurophilosophy

provides a

wide-ranging thesis regarding the current utility of research into

the neuroscience of economic behavior, and how this may be

improved. Foxall begins with a discourse on the nature of

neuroeconomics, and follows this with a consideration of

how justified it is that consumer choice is considered implicitly

to be rational rather than emotional. Central to this discussion is

the role of reward in motivating consumer choice and emotion,

which is covered first in terms of neuroscience, and then in terms

of specifically consumer behavior. Following this is a critique of

the perspectives offered by current neuroeconomic and, by

extension, neuromarketing research, leading to an account of

how neurophilosophy may fruitfully use neuroeconomic

findings. Finally, a set of directions for future research in this area

is proposed.

The following paper, Justin Garcia and Gad Saad's

Evolutionary

Neurom arketing: Darw inizing the Neuroim aging Parad igm for

Consumer Behavior

touches on many of the issues already

mentioned in previous papers, providing an interesting integrative

framework for future neuromarketing research. Beginning with a

review of salient neuroimaging literature relevant to marketing

research, Garcia and Saad

go

on to critique the main body of existing

work as somewhat atheoretical, and subject to an illusion of

explanatory depth, meaning that the sophistication of the

techniques may give off a sense of false profundity, whereas in

reality the majority of studies lack

a priori

hypotheses or strong

theoretical foundations - amounting to little more than fishing

expeditions for neural activation. Conversely, it is the thesis of

Garcia and Saad that evolutionary theory can provide a strong

underlying theoretical framework to guide nueromarketing

research in the future. Such an approach looks likely to help explain

why certain patterns of activation are likely to be observed, and thus

have significant implications for how human behavior in marketing

contexts can be explained with more accuracy - surely

a

key goal of

any neuromarketing manifesto.

Finally, we present an invited commentary from Michael Butler,

of the Organizational Cognitive Neuroscience Centre at Aston

University. In Neuromarketing and the Perception of Knowledge,

Butler shows the relevance of the emerging neuromarketing

discipline to the perennial tension between research and practice


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in organizational research. Butler s main thesis is that scholarly and

practitioner audiences have different perceptions about knowl-

edge, and it is do^vn to the knowledge development community to

attempt to reconcile these differences. The paper suggests a novel

update of previous modelsof research to incorporate concepts of

power and media reporting -key

issues

in neuromarketing research

given its potential for societal impact. As such, Butler s piece

provides an appropriate place to both end this state-of-the-art

collection, and perhaps ignite another debate. We hope that this

collection of papers will both stimulate and inspire readers to think

about this novel and exciting research area, and even to consider

engaging in research in the area.

References

BlakesleeS. 2004. If you have a buy button in your brain, what pushe s it?

The New York Times. 19 October.

BurneJ.2003. A probe inside themind of the shopper. The Financial

Times. 28 November.

Butler MJR, Senior C. 2007. Towards an organizational cognitive

neuroscience. The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

1118(4): 1-17.

CarrN. 2008. Neuromarketing could make mind reading thead -man s

ultimate tooL The Guardian.3April.

Lee Hotz

R. 2005.

M apping the

mind;

search ing forthewhy of

buy.

The Los

Angeles Times. 5 Febm ary.

LeeJA, Kacen

JJ.

2008. Cultural influence

on

customer satisfaction with

impulse and planned p urchase decisions./oMrna/ofBusiness Research

61(3): 265-272.

Lee

N,

Broderick AJ, Chamberlain

L.

2007. What

is

neuromarketing? A

discussion

and

agenda

for

future research. International Journal

o

sychophysiology63 J):199-204.

Lee

N,

Chamberlain

L.

2008. Neuroimaging

and

Psychophysiological

MeasurementinOrganizational

Research:

AnAgenda for Organizational

Cognitive N euro sden ce. Annals of

the

New York Academy

of

Sciences

2007 1118 :18-43.

McConnon

A.

2007. If I only had a brain scan. Business

Week.

16 January.

Roskies A. 2002. Neuroethics for the new millenium. Neuron 35(3):

21-23.

SeniorC, Rippon G. 2007. Cognitive neuroscience: contributions from

psychophysiology?International Journal of sychophysiology63(2):

135-136.

Shaw RL, SeniorC, Peel EA, Cooke R, Donnelly LS. 2008. (in pre ss). Ethical

issues in neuroimaging health research: an IPAstudy w ith research

participants./oMrwfl/ of Health

Psychology.

Thompson C. 2003. There s a sucker bom in every medial prefrontal

cortex. The New York Times. 26 October.


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Tierney J. 2004. Using M.R.I. sTo SeePolitics On the

Brain.

TheNew York

Times. 20 April.

WithchallsC.2004. Pushing the buy button. Newsweek. 22 March.

arl Senior^ and Nick

^School of Life He alth Scienc e, Organ isational

Cognitive Neu roscien ce Cen tre, Aston University, UK

^Aston Business School, Organisational Cognitive

Neu roscien ce Cen tre, Aston University, UK


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A Manifesto for Neuromarketing, 2008